Many American Christians seem to equivocate between the naïve and informed interpretations of “meek” in a motte-and-bailey-esque fashion.
The first thing that comes to mind is submission to church elders and (sometimes) others of the same denomination, restrained (barely) savagery when dealing with people who don’t believe as they do.
There is an element of submission, but originally it meant submission of the will to the knowledge of those who know better even when what they say goes counter your base interests.
For example, going back to praus/taming/meekness, one reference Jesus use is that of his “yoke” being easy and with a light load. Yoke is a U-shaped bar used to fix two draft animals together, so they can pull loads together. One way animal trainers used back then (and maybe still use today) to train an animal in a new job is to fix his neck on one side of a yoke, and on the other a very experienced animal. This way the learned animal, doing his well practiced routine, leads the untrained one to learn them much faster. So the idea here is that, by emulating the elders, the novice gets “there” much faster, and with much less difficulty, than he would by doing things on his own. Which, considering this is in context of iron age societies, in which an established practice remained as the state-of-the-art for generations at a time, in general tended to be true.
Nowadays things change at such a fast pace that this isn’t the case anymore, so there’s a clear mismatch between what the intended purposes of such a saying was meant to convey, that is, that one should listen to those who know better, and what one derives from the saying in a modern context, which depending on circumstances ends up frequently being the opposite.
It’s worth noting that Paul teaches the exact same thing in a much more straightforward way, for now still understandable verbatim, when he said it’s good to learn about everything to then prudentially chose what to actually use from all one learned. A huge number of Christians definitely don’t do that, preferring instead to practice the misinterpreted version of the “yoke” metaphor.
Many American Christians seem to equivocate between the naïve and informed interpretations of “meek” in a motte-and-bailey-esque fashion.
The first thing that comes to mind is submission to church elders and (sometimes) others of the same denomination, restrained (barely) savagery when dealing with people who don’t believe as they do.
There is an element of submission, but originally it meant submission of the will to the knowledge of those who know better even when what they say goes counter your base interests.
For example, going back to praus/taming/meekness, one reference Jesus use is that of his “yoke” being easy and with a light load. Yoke is a U-shaped bar used to fix two draft animals together, so they can pull loads together. One way animal trainers used back then (and maybe still use today) to train an animal in a new job is to fix his neck on one side of a yoke, and on the other a very experienced animal. This way the learned animal, doing his well practiced routine, leads the untrained one to learn them much faster. So the idea here is that, by emulating the elders, the novice gets “there” much faster, and with much less difficulty, than he would by doing things on his own. Which, considering this is in context of iron age societies, in which an established practice remained as the state-of-the-art for generations at a time, in general tended to be true.
Nowadays things change at such a fast pace that this isn’t the case anymore, so there’s a clear mismatch between what the intended purposes of such a saying was meant to convey, that is, that one should listen to those who know better, and what one derives from the saying in a modern context, which depending on circumstances ends up frequently being the opposite.
It’s worth noting that Paul teaches the exact same thing in a much more straightforward way, for now still understandable verbatim, when he said it’s good to learn about everything to then prudentially chose what to actually use from all one learned. A huge number of Christians definitely don’t do that, preferring instead to practice the misinterpreted version of the “yoke” metaphor.